Abstract
People comply with governmental restrictions for different motives, notably because they are concerned about the issue at hand or because they trust their government to enact appropriate regulations. The present study focuses on the role of concern and political trust in people’s willingness to comply with governmental restrictions during the Covid-19 pandemic. We conducted a survey amongst Italian and French participants ( N = 372) in March 2020 while both countries had imposed full lockdown. Moreover, a subsample of participants reported on their actual levels of compliance one week later ( N = 130). We hypothesised that either concern or trust should be sufficient to sustain participants’ willingness to comply and actual behaviour, but that the absence of both (distrustful complacency) would reduce compliance significantly. Results supported this hypothesis. We discuss implications of the interaction between concern and trust for public behaviour strategies as the pandemic progresses.
Highlights
At the time of writing, the world faces an unprecedented pandemic of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19)
We tested the model in two steps, introducing first the main predictors, adding country (−1 = Italy, 1 = France) and political partisanship as covariates
The expected Concern × Political Trust interaction was significant, regardless of whether country and partisanship were included in the model
Summary
At the time of writing, the world faces an unprecedented pandemic of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19). Drawing on previous theory and research on the roles of trust and concern as drivers of behavioural intentions (Abrams & Travaglino, 2018), we investigated the interactive effect of Covid-19 concern and political trust on willingness to comply We hypothesise that both high levels of political trust and high levels of concern should independently be sufficient to sustain compliance, but individuals who have lower levels of both trust and concern should be demotivated to comply—a condition of distrustful complacency. In the absence of both concern and trust, there should be a distinctively lower level of willingness to comply, as people’s distrustful complacency gives them little reason for doing so This two-part study tested the hypothesised interactive impact of concern and political trust on compliance with governmental restrictions related to the Covid-19 outbreak in two European countries: France and Italy. Data is publicly available on the OSF repository of the project (https://osf. io/4ugq3)
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